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Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

macworld.com

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Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#291

Post by vikramkr »

solarkraft wrote: post #157
torginus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. A ton of programs used by regular people (Chrome etc.) are RAM hogs, if you are a dev, then Docker is also an egregious example. If you happen to play games (a big thing for average people), that 8GB will be shared between the CPU and the GPU. Even the Steam Deck, admittedly a budget device, comes with 16GB. It's often mentioned that macOS is more frugal with RAM, a claim which I flat out found to be unt…

> I regularly saw Dock and Finder leak and eat gigabytes of RAM each Make sure to view "Real mem" in Activity Monitor. That's the amount of data actually stored in your RAM, the rest being swapped out. That number can be quite small, even for apps that theoretically use a lot of memory. I have found Docker to be an "actual" memory hog with not much of it being swapped out, but could imagine that it would be possible…

Swap memory use is worse than actual memory use. If it just reserving a big block and not using it then fine whatever but if it's using a lot of swap that means ram is probably bottlenecking you since swap is slow.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#292

Post by minimaul »

lpapez wrote: post #84
aurareturn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No it's not. A ton of programs used by regular people (Chrome etc.) are RAM hogs, if you are a dev, then Docker is also an egregious example. If you happen to play games (a big thing for average people), that 8GB will be shared between the CPU and the GPU. Even the Steam Deck, admittedly a budget device, comes with 16GB. That's why I said normal office workers and students. I never said 8GB is enough for devs. It w…

> That's why I said normal office workers and students. Costing 9 hundos a piece, Air is not something a regular company would buy for their employees. They're more likely to buy a budget laptop in the 400-500 range which you can bet will do just fine for office work, and you can always upgrade it if necessary. If a company really does need their employees to work a Mac, they will have to cough out a lot more for the…

At work, the m1/m2 airs are exactly what we buy for most employees. The base spec is absolutely fine for most of our staff, and they’ll get 3+ years out of them.

Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#294

Post by [deleted] »

fafhnir wrote: post #93

Don't buy it with 8 Gigs. Where's the Problem? If it's to expensive, buy another one! Is there a "humen right" or something that says: NO ONE SCHOUL HAVE LESS THAN 16 GIGS! A Pro(!) Machine which costs 4.000 Bucks with M3 Max, 36 Gigs and 1TB of SSD and ist used for 3 years or so costs 112 Bucks a month. For an absolute powerhouse which is doing Desktop-class Worstation-Performance on the go! And for a machine i am w…

[deleted]

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#295

Post by LoganDark »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #70
ge96 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of comparison is that 8 to 64. 8 GB for windows also sucks as well or Linux (save with tiling manager), software just bloats over time. Imo 8gb is not enough as baseline, today's 8gb is 16. I remember 4GB being good in 2015.

> What kind of comparison is that 8 to 64. Apple charges $200 to add 8GB, but you can get 64GB for less than $200.

You can get 64gb for less than $100 if you can use DDR4.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#296

Post by dangus »

Look, Apple knows what that have. They have a product people want. RAM and storage are their bread and butter margin-padding products and that has been the PC OEM’s game for decades.

There’s no shame in getting your bag.

Apple isn’t the only company that makes laptops with soldered memory, although soldered SSDs are less common. Some of the most popular models from brands like Dell and Lenovo have soldered memory, like the XPS 13 and X1.

Joe Consumer will never take a screwdriver to their laptop anyway, and your company certainly won’t pay for IT people $100 an hour to make upgrades and replace batteries. They’ll just “lease” computers and refresh on a ~3 year cycle because their apes for employees are going to spill coffee and crumbs on the damn thing anyway.

Just call these Apple systems what they are and pretend they cost $200 more than the base price in the first place and get over it. Either the costs makes sense to you or it doesn’t and go buy something else like 80% of the PC market already does.

Nobody seems to mind that brands like Razer and Alienware make overpriced gear because they aren’t as popular as Apple.

Yes, we get it, the base M3 14” “Pro” has “Pro” in the name and it’s not “Pro.” Who fucking cares? There are thousands of products that use the word “Pro” without being “Pro.” And yes the M3 14” MacBook Pro costs $400 less than the M3 Pro equipped model. The $1999 model gained 2GB of memory compared to the previous generation.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#297

Post by appplication »

ianai wrote: post #197
runjake wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech’s stagnated for over a decade I don’t know where to begin with this, but on topic, the M1 came out in 2020 and was a big tech leap in how PCs are done. Sure, all the individual technologies within existed elsewhere first. But Apple executed and delivered great products.

Sure. Running an OS that is carrying a lot of legacy OS X with introduced bugs and cruft. I love *nix and hope to keep using it for a long time more. But if you plunked 2002 me into modern day, apple’s offerings would be pretty cool but not what I’d expect after 2 decades. You could buy a desktop with 4 gigs of ram in 2010.

I bought my windows laptop with 8g of ram in 2009. It was nicer but certainly not top of the line. If I recall, I think the minimum you’d find at that time would be 4g, and some configurations offered 16g.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#298

Post by someNameIG »

cpncrunch wrote: post #238
doublepg23 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone 15 Pro that launched some months ago has 8G 8G is paltry on a desktop computer that should last years.

I have a 2016 Macbook pro, and I don't think I've ever seen it use more than 8GB (I have 16GB RAM). Just testing now with chrome tabs open including weather radar, libreoffice, and firefox, and still using just under 8GB RAM and 1GB swap.

I'm on a 2019 MacBook Pro and currently using 13Gb RAM. About 10 safari tabs open, books app, and a lightweight IDE.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#299

Post by Delk »

musha68k wrote: post #279
Delk wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s especially on me as my last private intel MBP before my “maxed out” M1 MBP wore out its on-board SSD after only 4 years and that one was large (1TB) with ample memory for the time (16GB). I wonder how that's possible, and whether that's an outlier rather than a case of probable risk to SSDs. I've got the impression that it shouldn't be likely to wear out a modern or semi-modern SSD with any kinds of typical la…

It’s probably fully deterministic in that case. It was bought summer 2015 and the SSD intermittently started to have write errors end of 2019 so 4.5 years. Were you running a “hackintosh” on that one? macOS is way more memory intensive than Linux on desktop in my experience / usage pattern.

No, no macOS. I just wouldn't expect that the software would make such a difference. I also wasn't sparing with that machine, went gigabytes into the swap regularly, the SSD was often at 85-90% capacity, and yet I was nowhere near depleting the reserved blocks and had zero problems after years of use. (I can't remember when exactly I bought the SSD but I think it was 2015 or 2016 and I used it until 2023.)

I guess it's possible, it just sounded like individual bad luck to me. My impression has been that you really have to write a lot to wear out the expected life of a non-ancient SSD.

Re: Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

#300

Post by ahartmetz »

notpushkin wrote: post #233
ahartmetz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't make RAM upgradeable and have unified memory architecture Silicon Graphics did it in the 90s, x86 laptops do something similar but it's not true UMA AFAIU mostly due to software / graphics API limitations. > that makes Apple Silicon good. Good interplay between CPU and GPU, the major advantage of UMA, does nothing for raw CPU performance. What I find attractive about Apple silicon is that it has very high…

> Soldered RAM can be somewhat higher speed and lower energy than replaceable Can we have one piece of soldered RAM and one slot to add more RAM later on though? (at the cost of possibly unmatched speed and other stuff that happens when you mix and match RAM as you like)

You can. My Thinkpad T14 Gen1 AMD has that. I'd prefer two sticks over soldered + stick. Also, memory bandwidth is usually kind of crap unless you add that memory stick in the slot. Typically 25-40% (GPU) performance difference in games between stick and no stick. At least the 16 GB -> 32 GB factory upgrade was cheap, they can't charge crazy prices because people would just buy the RAM separately.
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